Customer Reviews

The Weather Wizard's Cloud Book: A Unique Way to Predict the Weather Accurately and Easily by Reading the Clouds

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I first read this book when my math teacher lent it to me. Since then, I have gotten my own copy of this book and use it quite often. To get an idea of what the weather will be like within the next 24 hours, all you need to know is the wind direction and the cloud type. A quick glance through the book will do the rest. My only complaint is that it is sometimes hard to find the correct type of cloud in the book, as clouds do not always conform to the general pictures in the book. For help in identifying the cloud type, I would recommend the NATIONAL AUDUBON SOCIETY FIELD GUIDE TO NORTH AMERICAN WEATHER. The pictures in there are wonderful, clear and really help a lot. Otherwise, THE WEATHER WIZARD'S CLOUD BOOK has proved very useful while away from a weather broadcast. If you're outdoors and away from a T.V. or radio station often, this book is a must.

This small hard to find book (unless you order it online) starts with a basic premise: to predict the weather you need to do 2 things-determine the direction of the wind and identify the clouds currently in the sky. That being said, I would consider this book a great primer for anyone interested in naked eye weather forecasting.

The book includes color cloud charts, discusses weather folklore, precipitation, warm and cold fronts, and volcanic eruptions.

This a general primer. The information is not spoon fed to the reader.

The strength of this approach is Rubin's writing is entertaining and lively, and will enourage you to not only make your own weather predictions, but to also seek more information outside the scope of the book.

The weakness is that some of the material is incomplete. The book was completed by Louis Rubin's children with the help of a meteorologist after Rubin passed away (based on the Introduction), using Rubin's cloud photo collections and his collected writings.

As a result, some of the material is incomplete. For example, Rubin describes the 4 types of clouds and the 10 specific clouds most associated with weather changes. You then have to search all over the book to find those 10 clouds, and even then, you're not sure (based on the prefixed names) if you're looking at the right photographs. I suspect at the time of his passing, Rubin's cloud photo collection was far from complete.

That being said, I still liked the book, consider it a keeper, and respect Rubin's work in this area as an amateur meteorologist.

I bought this book in preparation for an advanced mariner's meteorology course, and could not have made this comment without having first gained that higher level of knowledge.

This is a suberb book with two major flaws:

1) It sticks to the two-dimensional depiction of weather that is common to the average person. Although there are a couple of illustrations showing altitude, the author could easily have put in a few pages on the rotation of the earth, the 500 mb level, and how weather on the surface cannot be understood without underestanding what is happening at the 18,000 level. As my instructor put it, the high-level troughs are the chicken that hatches the surface level (scrambled) egg.

2) It provides the pictures of the clouds, but missed the key chance to break down the names into the original latin meanings, to create a matrix of high (Cirro), medium (alto), and low (strato), with substantive meaning including layer (stratus), curly (cirrus), stacked in a vertical heap (cumulo-cumulus), and delivering rain (nimbus).

Add this little matrix above, and read "Mariner's Guide to the 500-Millibar Chart" by Joe Stenkiewicz and Lee Chesneau, and Google for <Lee Chesneau> to find his web site, and you'll have all you need to move to the better three-dimensional interactive viewing of weather and weather charts.

I also recommend Understanding Weatherfax

A very handy book for "instant" weather forcasting. Interesting to read and written with a bit of humor. The only shortcoming is the arrangment of the photographs of the different clouds, they are not in logical sequence.

Excellent book. Using this along with a couple others to get back into weather forcasting Thank you for an excellent book

If your into forcasting weather, or just want to know how to, this book is for you.

OK book for newbies or beginners to this interesting hobby(uninteresting if in Michigan)